[Developer Blog] A 60 day trial key for your favorite soon-to-be EVE player

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Crucible is here. It has new nebulae, new ships, scalable UI, lots of balancing lots of cool features and a plethora of tweaks and fixes. It&rsquo;s been a long few months of getting back to the roots of EVE, and we hope this shows you, the players, our direction for the foreseeable future. We&rsquo;re going to be evaluating new approaches over the next year to get new people to EVE, and we&rsquo;re launching the first one right now this holiday season.

Later today, you&rsquo;ll find something new in Account Management: a transferable 60 day trial game code. This is a new special form of trial, one of many we&rsquo;re going to play with. We&rsquo;ll talk about the 'why&rsquo;s' in a second, but first here are the rules:

These codes are single use.

These codes are transferable.

They can be copied and sent via most any means, and are good for creating one 60 day EVE trial account.

All trial account restrictions are in place

These codes may not be used to extend any existing trial or buddy account, or to add game time to any previously existing EVE account.

Availability of regular 14 day and 21 day Buddy trials are unaffected by this promotion

So, you&rsquo;re saying to yourself&hellip;&rdquo;that&rsquo;s a neat extended trial key, but what is in it for me?&rdquo; The answer is, honestly not much. Just a bigger richer EVE and a chance to give your favorite person in the world something they can&rsquo;t get anywhere else. We thought we&rsquo;d try an experiment and see what would happen if we gave out 60 day trial keys for EVE players to pass on. It&rsquo;s that simple.

Again, Crucible is about getting EVE back to its roots, it's in-space, player driven roots. Over the years we&rsquo;ve gone from a &ldquo;buy now&rdquo; model, to a short trial, to a longer trial method of getting new players to experience the EVE Universe. Looking back at the data and surveys over the last few years we see people wanting more and more time to get familiar with EVE. The 14 days we settled on is looking a little long in the tooth in the modern world, and honestly, EVE is just really big and players deserve more time to really get into the game.

So, grand experiment #1, give out 350K 60 day trial codes. The only way to get one is to ask an EVE player or have an EVE player ask you. We&rsquo;re not looking for hordes of l337 kids with ADD We&rsquo;re hoping that an extended trial to poke around in the EVE universe will give more folks the time needed to get engaged and get involved in EVE Online. And, given the crowded schedule of holidays and new releases around this time of year, we&rsquo;re hoping that extended play time let&rsquo;s people pickup and learn EVE at their own pace.

So do with these what you will; drag a friend to 0.0, sucker a friend into helping you mine, or just bring in someone who likes the pewpew. Right now, EVE is as beautiful as it has ever been; space is vast and full of lazor beams. Get in the game.

Two updates, one annoying and one pretty good

When it came time to populate the 60 day trial codes for giveaway, we got an unexpected error that basically said &ldquo;Nope, not gonna give these codes today&hellip;but tomorrow looks good.&rdquo;

So, we&rsquo;re going to move their deployment to late EVE time tomorrow after they get one more pass through our QA processes. It&rsquo;s clear a lot of players are looking for them, and we&rsquo;re sorry for the inconvenience, but we&rsquo;d rather make sure that the core game fixes and deployments take priority today and send the codes tomorrow.

But the good news is that we are going to extend the availability of the CA-1 implants until the 5th. So, everyone with a paying account should be sure to get in and redeem theirs by then. I should again point out that this is CA-1 and its&rsquo; part of an implant set&hellip;so more on that soon.

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